The convenience of free delivery often makes ordering a pizza a more attractive alternative than making one at home. The availability of gourmet and professional equipment, such as pizza stones, however have made preparing an authentic pizzeria-style pizza at home a possibility. A pizza stone cooks the pizza evenly providing a continuous source of heat and the stone absorbs moisture to provide a crispy crust.
Pizza stones are flat having no lip or edge to grab when removing the stone from the oven. Thus, in order to remove a stone, or any other flat item, from an oven, it is necessary to pull the rack out of the oven, reach behind the stone and push the edge of the stone over the lip of the oven rack, and then push the rack back into the oven before grabbing the stone. When the rack is pulled out of the oven, it is only partially supported and can tilt either falling from the oven or dumping its hot contents onto the floor. Additional safety concerns arise when, at home, children and animals are underfoot.
Oven shelves have been designed to address a number of problems encountered in cooking and baking in an oven. For example, Ogg et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 5,938,968) describe a retractable shelf for a microwave oven to assist the cook in accessing foods which have to be turned or stirred while cooking. Slaughter (U.S. Pat. No. 2,806,467) describes an oven shelf with an insulated handle so the rack can be removed without donning an oven mitt. Hanson et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 1,941,301) describe a tray holder which facilitates withdrawal of a tray from the oven and allows the raising and lowering of that tray within the oven. Each of these racks, although useful for its intended purpose, do not address the problem of removing flat items safely from an oven rack.
All patents, patent applications, provisional patent applications and publications referred to or cited herein, or from which a claim for benefit of priority has been made, are incorporated by reference in their entity to the extent they are not inconsistent with the explicit teachings of the specification.
The invention is an oven rack which has a notch along its peripheral surface. Items placed into the oven, on the rack, with an edge extending over that notch can be easily removed from the oven without having to slide the rack out of the oven. In a preferred embodiment, this notch is placed on the front of the rack toward the door, near the center and is about 3 inches to about 9 inches wide by about 3 inches to about 9 inches deep allowing adequate room for a hand covered by an oven mitt to reach into the notch and access items on the rack. The oven rack can further include a handle to assist in pulling the rack from the oven.